After I wrote the annual letter and we declared it finished, I noticed that I did not mention life at Blueberry Hill. Usually I do, so this was interesting to me. It's not that there is nothing to say, but maybe the ups and downs no longer seem newsworthy. After 16 years of practice, we just take it in stride. We don't take it for granted -- people keep moving out and moving in, shaking us up -- but we have a steady hand on the tiller, more or less. We are building rituals and traditions and ongoing systems and that helps.
I don't think that most of the people who live here would put it this way, but I will: we are practicing what it would take for the world to be a better place. We are learning what it means to love your neighbor. People who don't live in intentional communities, looking in from the outside, can't always understand what the experiment is about. It is about having faith in relationships, even if those relationships might not even be good. We practice caring about each other, creating memories together, paying attention. We practice patience. This is really hard. We don't choose our neighbors -- there is no guarantee that would work any better, actually. Our neighbors choose to move here.
Ever since the beginning of this endeavor, I have known that it is not about loving each individual neighbor. It is about loving them for being in the neighborhood and for wanting to be part of this experiment. Not everyone comes for the same reasons, and that can cause some difficulties, but just about everyone gets something out of being here. There is a couple who moved here knowing nothing about the concept, and they have been here for the whole time, and they are still mostly staying on the fringes. But they are an asset to the group through their willingness to share technical expertise, occasional cooking, and participation at meetings, help in emergencies and lots of friendly smiles. Another couple has been here from the beginning, also came with no background, and has been deeply involved the whole time. They are also traumatized by the experience the most often, as they are so deeply well intentioned that they work very hard and they suffer disappointment when other people don't work as hard as they do. There are single people who came here because they wanted the community and sometimes they are disappointed at the reality of living amongst a bunch of nuclear families. There are elderly people who could use more attention than they get but who do get attention when it is really needed. More than half of the neighbors have lived here for fewer than five years and this presents an ongoing challenge of redefining ourselves, teaching people what we know, letting them have a say in what comes next.
But I think this is such an important effort, this effort to work together even when it is hard. We get upset with each other, we cry, some people stomp out of meetings. And this fall, after a particularly unsuccessful meeting, the next evening we had a common meal, scheduled before the meeting had been planned. Lots of people came, we ate together, we resumed life. Even the person who stomped out of the meeting came to dinner. She was brave and she knew it and she said it. And we welcomed her warmly.
My nephews are in a graduate program, studying peace and transformation. Even though this is a wealthy, suburbanite-populated, small goal community (we want to be good neighbors), we are also studying peace and transformation here at Blueberry Hill. We stumble along, doing our best to learn from our mistakes, but we never lose hope. We have had estranged neighbors, angry for months, come back into the fold and start cooking and eating with us again. There are so many ways to eat these days, and we try to accommodate each other when we cook. We have discovered, like all tribes before us, that cooking and eating together is the most reliable way to keep ourselves close.
When we first moved in, many people who were watching expressed their doubts. They knew that people don't want to behave for the good of the whole, they take care of themselves first. They knew that making decisions by consensus would never work. Certainly they are not wrong, but they did not understand how affirming and inspiring it can be to create something with a group. Many of us cannot imagine living in a normal neighborhood again, not after living in a place where people can ask for help and get it (rides to the airport, taking care of children, soup for the unwell, packing boxes...) and learn to cook for 30 and live through multiple snow events (so much shoveling, cheerfully done). It would be so insular.
The other night we were having a family dinner here. Before the family dinner, Jon and Rebecca and I had cooked and packed a meal for 25 at the Hypothermia Shelter. Two of our neighbors came to our house and picked it up: they were the serving team. Because one of them is Jewish and they had asked about this earlier, we invited them to come back and light Chanukah candles after they finished serving the meal. While we were eating dinner, our next door neighbor came and dropped off a check for egg nog that I had ordered from the dairy for them. We waved, he left it on the counter. Eventually the other people came back from the shelter, bringing their 6 year old with them, and we all lit candles together. We told the story of Chanukah as best we could (shameful how we can't even remember all the details) and put it in context because that's who we are, and we spent some time together. It was all so normal even though we don't socialize with them generally. We are just happy to be neighbors.
Not everyone who lives here likes groups. Jon isn't particularly comfortable going to meetings or making decisions with a long process. But he is an important member of this community -- he contributes his skills and work all the time. He is part of the program, he just doesn't love all the process. We have all kinds of people here and we just figure it out.
Obviously I could go on forever. There is so much to learn from living in community. We have been very lucky and we have also worked hard to keep it functioning. The world would work so much better if everyone tried harder to be in relationship.
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